My Ideal Post-Modernist

So, the modernist reality is often grim and its economic practice rather dismal, to
use the standard phrase about its non-science (see Anatole Kaletsky on economics,
Part 3). However, Modern culture, stemming from this reality is sometimes very
different from its background, and also critical of modernisation. This critical
strand is precisely the one that leads into Post-Modernism, a golden thread of
continuity. To be brief, it includes such works as Giorgio de Chirico’s
metaphysical paintings, Picasso’s Guernica, Stravinsky’s Sacre de Printemps, Le
Corbusier’s buildings at Ronchamp and Chandigarh, TS Eliot’s The Waste Land and
James Joyce’s Ulysses. All these monuments of Modernism are fundamentally concerned
with time-binding and responding to the myths embedded in contemporary life. Cathy
Gere’s recent Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism even shows how most of these
great works are involved with a single past myth: that of ancient Crete and the
Minoan myth of the Minotaur. These creations are complex mixtures of many
discourses and, in the terms I have been stressing, typically double-coded between
past and present, high art and low, etc. They eschew the reductive impulse of most
Modernist work and while abstract at moments they resist the eliminative strain of
the Modern. In a word, they are proto-Post-Modern, the strand that continues to run
unbroken through the 20th century – albeit as the thin thread of a minority.
The writer John Barth, like Umberto Eco, calls attention to this strand in The
Literature of Replenishment (republished in full, Part 2), as he emphasises the
inclusive nature of PM:

My ideal postmodernist author neither merely repudiates nor merely imitates either
his twentieth-century Modernist parents or his nineteenth-century premodernist
grandparents. He has the first half of our century under his belt, but not on his
back. Without lapsing into moral or artistic simplism, shoddy craftsmanship,
Madison Avenue venality, or either false or real naiveté, he nevertheless aspires
to a fiction more democratic in its appeal than such late-modernist marvels (by my
definition and in my judgement) as Beckett’s Stories and Texts for Nothing or
Nabokov’s Pale Fire. He may not hope to reach and move the devotees of James
Michener and Irving Wallace – not to mention the lobotomized mass-media
illiterates. But he should hope to reach and delight, at least part of the time,
beyond the circle of what Mann used to call the Early Christians: professional
devotees of high art.12

Here again Post-Modernism gains by being contrasted with Late-Modernism and

enhanced by relating to previous Modernisms, not being a rupture or an anti-
modernism. Also, Barth’s formulation of an ideal post-modernist is helpful. This is
particularly true when there is such widespread confusion in the public’s mind
between the social condition and the high culture that relates to it; or because of
Fredric Jameson’s confusion between Late-Capitalism and the cultural movement that
critiques it. Most bewilderment stems from the muddle between a global consumer
system and a high culture. Indeed, many Still Modernists do not grant this
distinction and, like the writer Arthur Kroker, see the whole movement en bloc as
‘excremental culture’.13 Such oversimplification misses the point, especially the
threads that lead out of Modernism, those of TS Eliot, Le Corbusier et al.
The exemplary post-modernist, as Barth avers, acknowledges the realities of Ford,
Marx, Freud and Darwin, but has these ideas and realities ‘under his belt, but not
on his back’. As the reader will find, for every Fordism there is now a Post-
Fordism, and for every Darwinian there is a follower who has understood how Darwin
was half-right. This does not mean, as the recent cover issue of the New Scientist
put it, that ‘Darwin was Wrong’.14 Many Post-Darwinists have pointed out, over the
last 30 years, that in describing evolution many other factors beside the
environment have to be taken into account. They include internal factors within the
organism, Hox genes, ecological interactions and recently horizontal gene transfer
(HGT). Elsewhere I have written on this Post-Darwinism and it is especially
important in design and architecture, for framing questions of the responsibility
of the designer versus chance. If the Darwinian paradigm underlay Modernism through
its reductivism, Haeckel, Nietzsche and social Darwinists like John D Rockefeller,
then a Post-Darwinism is also essential to the growing PM paradigm. This is
discussed in Part 3 by Charles Birch and Edward Goldsmith, a Darwinism that is
‘under the belt, but not on our back’.
My ideal post-modernist, like Barth’s, is fundamentally concerned with time-
binding, with making clear the connection of past, present and future. One of the
chronic problems of the dominant Modernism today, especially in its late phase, is
its loss of memory and continuity, the way it is infantilised by the marketplace.
Gore Vidal chides the USA as ‘the United States of Amnesia’, and his sometime enemy
Norman Mailer at least agreed on this point, saying that US architects had created
in their Late-Modern developments ‘empty landscapes of psychosis’. The fast-
changing economy and the imperatives of work and consumption create the depthless
present where cultural continuity is lost, if it exists at all. So, if I have to
point to an ideal post-modern artist I would mention Anselm Kiefer who binds
various epochs together in his contemporary constructions. The recent past, and for
him this would include the Nazi catastrophe, ancient myth, future hope, archetypal
drama are realised in a new grammar. Many discourses cross on his large canvases
and constructions. His work is the PM equivalent of The Waste Land and Guernica,
and on occasion so was that of Ron Kitaj.
Yet there is another essential aspect of an ideal post-modernism that eludes
contemporary artists and that concerns contemporary metaphysics. Any great period
of culture well expresses the fundamental insights of the reigning scientific
paradigm and, if that has morphed ahead from Modernism, it still awaits a
Michelangelo to transform it into art. Let me reiterate the shifts: from Newton to
Einstein, from linear to nonlinear dynamics, from determinism to self-organising
systems, or from simple to complex systems. So the slides and developments go, each
one not a refutation of its modernist counterpart but a deeper insight into the
universe. The last section of this book, Part 3, is devoted to them, in particular
Tito Arecchi’s short article ‘Chaos and Complexity’.
These collective post-modern sciences of complexity, that are named as such in the
1980s, actually grow out of those that were mooted in the 1960s, the latter a
period I would therefore call Complexity 1. As the reader will also find in Part 2,
Jane Jacobs in 1961 and Robert Venturi in 1966 sounded the first bell of post-
modernism with their respective theories of complex urbanism and architecture.
Complexity in the city and complexity and contradiction in architecture were
explicitly formulated as the shift in these two fields and they had a profound
effect, deepening their professional orientations. But 20 years later, as the film
puts it in The Postman Always Rings Twice, by this time round we could actually say
that the universe itself is a complex, self-organising system; we could understand
a deeper complexity theory. The Santa Fe Institute was the place where these
‘sciences of the 21st century’ were explicitly formulated, and Complexity II became
the metaphysics of our Post-man. At the time however, I found it was hard to
persuade the earlier theorists, such as Venturi, that this was true. Perhaps
architects are more conservative than urbanists, because Jane Jacobs certainly
appreciated Mark 2 and the economists at Santa Fe.
By the late 1990s at least 30 different attempts were made by scientists and
philosophers to capture what was at stake, and several best-selling books on the
subject had appeared.15 In an issue of Architectural Design in 1997, ‘New Science =
New Architecture’, I also tried to summarise this new paradigm, with several
definitions of a nonlinear architecture, and above all of complexity itself. Defining
complexity adequately was like trying to pin down sudden creation on the wing:

Complexity is the theory of how emergent organisation may be achieved by

interacting components pushed far from equilibrium (by increasing energy, matter or
information) to the threshold between order and chaos. This important border or
threshold is where the system often jumps, bifurcates or creatively interacts in a
new nonlinear, unpredictable way (the Eureka moment) and where the new organisation
may be sustained through feedback and the continuous input of energy.
In this process quality emerges spontaneously as self-organisation, meaning, value,
openness, fractal patterns, attractor formations and (often) increasing complexity
(a greater degree of freedom).16
The new complexity paradigm in architecture was then emerging, an
identifiable, second stage of Post-Modernism, led now not by Robert Venturi but by
Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, Cecil Balmond, Frank Gehry and ARM. It has
continued to thrive ever since although, as with many movements that become global,
it bloomed as both a commercial and academic fashion. And so once again fashion-
time played its game of asset-strip, and reduced complexity to computer software
and, in architecture, to funny shapes.
In any case, no architect, artist or creator has yet expressed the canonic version
of contemporary metaphysics. In terms of searching for the ideal post-modernism, a
masterpiece summarising the complexity view of the universe does not exist. But,
there are many interesting attempts visible on the horizon, and it must be a matter
of time, and willpower.

Long Wave, Medium Wave: Deepening Modernism

Where does this quick, and selective, survey lead in the answer to the big question
posed at the outset, where and what is our time? If one took an informal poll among
experts, and concerned participants in the debate, it would probably lead to some
agnostic results, some of which are unexceptional. Obviously, there are at least
two somewhat opposed Post-Modernisms, a deconstructive version that I and others
would call Late-Modernism, and a reconstructive version offered here. What unites
these two PMs is a shared concern for pluralism, and a critique of monolithic
culture, what Lyotard called ‘a war on totality’. This essential definition would
mean that post-modernists of all shades would deny that a single label could be
adequate to the multispeed times of global reality. They are all cultural
relativists in this sense though not in others.
However, stepping back and looking at the larger picture of global development
gives a more nuanced answer. With the growth of modernisms since at least the
Renaissance, when moderna came in vogue, when the nation state became dominant and
capitalism started in Italy and elsewhere, it does make sense to talk about the
Modern World as historians do. At the same time one insists on the legitimacy of
the 5,000 languages, and cultures, which cut it into many parts. The hegemony of
modernism starts about 1500, and there are many holocausts to go with it, most of
them brought to consciousness, named and debated only in the last 30 years (like
the ‘American Holocaust’).17 Placing the various modernisms within this overarching
long wave, one could say that there are at least two historical medium waves that
develop roughly since the 1960s, the Late- and Post- ones that agitate the waters.
Wave theory is, of course, just another branch of physics and a metaphor for
historians, but it helps to illuminate the question.
If the big wave is made up from the three aspects – modernity, modernisation and
Modernism – and I believe it is, then the globe is still very much in a modern
period. It rules, not OK as far as minorities and ecologists are concerned, but it
still dominates most cultures. Nevertheless, its critics and creators have moved
elsewhere, to adopt a spatial metaphor, both forward and back and to the side,
creating these medium waves as they do so. So, while it is true that Post-Modernism
is really a part of the bigger wave and has not yet fundamentally changed its force
or direction, the cultural movement has, I would argue, deepened its quality and
thought. That is to say, the PM ecological agenda has little to show against the
juggernaut of the global economy except many high-sounding pronouncements and one
or two ameliorations such as lessening that indeterminate hole in the ozone layer;
while pm science has many accomplishments to its credit.
To get a picture of how the contemporary world views reality, it is more convincing
to concentrate on these sciences of complexity and see the way they combine with
the sciences of simplicity. It is a picture of both/and, not either/or. Thus the
fractal geometry of nature, that appears to cover most of reality, still has to
defer to Euclidean geometry in the case of spherical planets, hexagonal beehives,
and so much architecture in the right-angled city. But fractal geometry is the more
general science and they are both useful. In like manner, Einsteinian relativity
theory is a better description of the cosmos than Newton’s theory of gravity. In
particular, we know it is much better at framing the universe at high speeds, over
great distances and in supergravity. But since we live mostly in the slow-moving,
Newtonian world, our everyday experience denies this deeper truth. The point is
also that neither Einsteinian nor quantum physics disproved Newtonian mechanics –
the keystone of modern science. They were just deeper and more general explanations
of reality.
This analogy of a dual and hybrid view is largely true for the other sciences of
complexity: thermodynamics, nonlinearity, the chaos sciences, biology and
cosmology, to name but a few. They have merged with and deepened their modern
progenitors. Again, like post-industrialisation these complexity sciences take off
in a big way during the 1960s. Weather prediction, the chaos science accidentally
discovered by Edward Lorenz, is the standard example. And these formulations are
wider, deeper, more general than their forebears. In a sense, they include the
sciences of simplicity, the linear ones, as limiting cases.
I think we can follow this parallel from the sciences into the relationship between
the Modern and Post-Modern. The two different orientations complement each other
and are often synthesised or else hybridised together. This is certainly true in
art and architecture, where the styles and ideas are merged in such profusion that
classification becomes difficult, even pedantic. Pluralism now reigns in the arts
with maybe 100 or so global styles extant, and at any large art fair it is this PM
variety that is most evident, not an integrated Modernism. True, it is a market
pluralism, without deep conviction, but an important differentiation nonetheless.
What characterises the sciences and the arts is recognisable in other areas of
culture and civilisation. Modern orientations have been synthesised by post-modern
ones, or exist in tension with them, or they are melded and hybridised. Dual,
paired, merged or one swallowing the other? Probably every discipline and discourse
should be examined separately. But, following the contrasts I mentioned at the
outset, I present a very modernist diagram, a list of the father and the daughter.
The argument would be that in nearly every case, to get an idea of what kind of
world we are in, we should put a big ‘and’ between the two sides of this bloodline.
Maybe that explains the irony of today asking, what period are we in?
These 38 contrasts reveal a pattern and of course do not fully define either side of
the equation. I have only discussed a few of them, while some others are treated by
contributors to this anthology. Obvious lacunae in my sketch are feminism,
multiculturalism, the decline of religion and rise of a pm spirituality. But the
general argument I think can be sustained that, as usual, an individual and culture
are both mixtures of different epochs, sedimentations of various orientations. The
pattern of our time is the post-modern sublating the modern, but the economy and
society of the globe is still based on modernisation. Now, at the time of writing
(August 2009), that the global system seems to have been momentarily saved from
meltdown by a huge effort of reflation, no one can doubt that Modernist theory and
practice still dominate. Bigness and massification and the Leviathan still rule, but
not OK. One can conceive of an ideal post-modernism as the loyal opposition to its
father, or the continuation of modernism and its transcendence, and those who do
not conceive of movements in terms of their ideals are doomed to misunderstanding.